She said: ‘I fell in love with the print and kept the fabric for “something special”. You will find with fellow sewers that we have bags of fabrics that we have collected over the years for “something special” and they never get used.’
The International Committee of the Red Cross said this week it had been in contact with Lvova-Belova, the first confirmation of high-level international intervention to reunite families with children who were forcibly deported.
ICRC spokesman Jason Straziuso said the organization was in contact with Lvova-Belova “in line with its mandate to restore contact between separated families and facilitate reunification where feasible.”
Mykola Kuleba said at a news conference in Kyiv that the children were expected to arrive in the capital later in the day.
Kuleba is the executive director of the Save Ukraine organization and is the presidential commissioner for children’s rights.
‘I realise I hadn’t had an education, and I tried some side jobs, 9-5 jobs and none of it worked. So I did a bit of study on how to work in something you love. That was social media, and it’s really started to take off in the last year.’
Sophia wanted to show people that they don’t need to spend a lot of money to make amazing clothes and posted a clip demonstrating how she turned charity shop curtains into a stunning bustier dress with tied straps.
She says that she remembers when she got her first commission from a work colleague, who wanted a dress for a party, she went home ‘crying’ because she was ‘flattered’ that someone believed in her and ‘trusted’ her to make her a dress.
A 2017 video posted online showed a group of armed people, reported to be Wagner contractors, torturing a Syrian man, beating him to death with a sledgehammer and cutting his head before mutilating and then burning his body.
In December 2021, the European Union accused the group of ‘serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings,’ and of carrying out ‘destabilizing activities’ in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
In November 2022, a video surfaced online that showed a former Wagner contractor Hamadi Bouta, a Syrian army deserter, getting beaten to death with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian side and was recaptured.
The Wagner Group has taken an increasingly visible role in the war in Ukraine as regular Russian troops suffered heavy attrition and lost control over some previously captured territory in a series of humiliating setbacks.
“Under no circumstance is promoting violence and hate speech on social media platforms acceptable, as it could hurt innocent people,” said Nay San Lwin, co-founder of advocacy group Free Rohingya Coalition, who has faced abuse on Facebook.
Western countries and United Nations experts have accused Wagner Group mercenaries of committing numerous human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.
The terrifying group went viral in 2022 after a video of members beating a deserter to death with a sledgehammer spread online, has allegedly offered to help Haiti’s embattled government take on violent gangs, the documents detailed.
Hassoo and fellow Yazidi activists compiled a report website that urged the United States and other nations to probe the role social media platforms including Facebook and YouTube played in crimes against their minority Yazidi community.
“Ultimately, Meta’s decisions should be shaped by its expectations under the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and not what is most economical or logistically sound for the company,” he said in emailed comments.
‘This is a very interesting sign that there’s a degrading of their capabilities,’ Candace Rondeaux, an expert on Wagner who is a senior director at New America, a Washington think tank, told the New York Times.
Some Russian media have alleged Wagner’s involvement in the July 2018 killings of three Russian journalists, who were shot dead in the Central African Republic while investigating the group’s activities there.
Scrutiny over how it tackles abuse on its platforms intensified after whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked documents showing the problems Facebook encounters in policing content in countries that pose the greatest risk to users.
In a report on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch said tech firms must show that their actions in Ukraine are “procedurally fair,” and avoid any “arbitrary, biased, or selective decisions” by basing them on clear, established, and transparent processes website In the case of Ukraine, Meta said that native Russian and Ukrainian speakers were monitoring the platform website round the clock, and that the temporary change in policy was to allow for forms of political expression that would “normally violate” its rules.
Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that the company was using its access to gold and other resources in Africa to fund its operations in Ukraine.